e commerce - help

[finnback]

I'm looking at setting up an on line shop to sell a small range of clothing. Having seen the 1and1 adverts on TV, I bought an e-commerce package and domain name from them. We've had a play around with it (my partner is relatively savvy in this department) but are struggling with functionality just at the design stage. Thats before we get onto clever bits like payment and putting items up for sale etc.

Therefore, is there another way to set up an very basic online shop thats idiot proof up front?

Its a non-profit website so i don't have any money to pay a web designer at this point in time as i've done before with other websites i'm involved with.

Any advise appreciated

cheers

 

[Andreas Rex]

Hi finnback,

I've just sent you a PM...whether it will be of any use or not remains to be seen!

 

[MyCult]

Was going to make some silly comment suggesting the best way to setup a 'non-profit ecommerce site' would be to buy the domain and do nothing with it. It wouldn't make profit then! That is a fairly shit answer though.

Constructive comments:
I would point you towards Magento. Magento is an industry standard open source Ecommerce solution. It is fantastic in terms of SEO and customization. On the magento forum there is a thread dedicated to setting up & running magento on 1&1.

There are lots of free Magento themes available as well as premium ones.

Hope that helps.

 

[finnback]

Thanks ... i'll take a look at Megento and report back.

Ps. I guess a non profit e-commerce site does sound a bit stupid but tis true

 

[Wolfenrook]

Joomla+Virtuemart, with Paypal and maybe Alertpay for payments would be my suggestion. Easier to confiure than Magento. All you need is php and sql on your hosting and you are ready to go. If you need SEO, there's a good commercial plugin for virtuemart that makes it compatible with SEO components for Joomla. Joomla and Virtuemart are both free, as are most templates, just a few plugins that are commercial.

Ade

 

[markmh]

I've used joomla and virtuemart for awaited was running and fond it very easy however I would recommend shopify for someone who has no experience of joomla.

 

[The Stafford Beast]

I was a bit sceptical when I saw 1-and-1's advert. Not having used 1-and-1's package for myself, I can't really comment on it. However, my intuition (and cynicism) tells me that it'll probably be more of a marketing tool for them, than something that will really earn you a lot of money.

E-commerce packages rarely work out-of-the-box and all require a fair amount of tweaking, customisation and compromise in order to get them to work with your business model. Most packages seem to be geared around selling electronic equipment and gadgets etc. You need to decide whether you spend a lot of effort tailoring the package yourself, or modify your business model to work with the e-commerce package, but don't do both!

One piece of advice I'll give you is that you shouldn't spend a load of time thinking about the look & feel of the web site. Ebay and Amazon are possibly the two best e-commerce sites on the web, but they don't look that glamorous. Go for something simple that works for you.

 

[markmh]

Ebay and Amazon are possibly the two best e-commerce sites on the web, but they don't look that glamorous. Go for something simple that works for you.

agree with this, maybe you could try selling your stuff on ebay and amazon as these site are well established, it wont cost much to get your product on their site and they have a huge amount of traffic going to their sites so you wont have to spend time and money on building traffic to your site and for the sake of paying them a few percent of each sale it may be worth it. Particularly if your product is new and you want to test out the market before investing in a full on eCommerce site.